by DailyDigest

Economy

There are currently 2,208 billionaires in the world, twice the number since the global financial crisis of 2007-08. Most of them are from North America and Europe. They currently have more wealth than ever before, according to a new report from Oxfam International. The combined wealth of the richest 26 among these 2,208 billionaires reached US$1.4 trillion. This amount of wealth is equivalent to the total wealth of the planet’s 3.8 billion poorest people. That means that only 26 individuals have as much wealth as 3.8 billion people. Let that sink in.

Many decisions that affect your life are now dictated by the interpretation of your data profile rather than personal interactions. And it’s not just about advertising banners influencing the brand of the soap you buy—the same mechanics of profiling users and targeting messages apply to political campaigns and visa applications as much as supermarket metrics. When advertising looks like news and news look like entertainment, all types of content are profiled on the basis of your data.

Interestingly, the quarterly lobbying disclosure filings not only reveal how much the companies spent on their lobbying efforts, they also provide us with information on which issues these efforts are related to. Take Google for example: in the past quarter, the search giant spent $4.9 million on lobbying with respect to issues ranging from regulation of online advertising and immigration of highly skilled individuals to copyright law, tax issues and trade policy. For additional information please refer to the official database.

I have just returned from a two-week holiday in Tasmania with my family. One of the national park rangers on the Tasman Peninsula told us how 15 years ago he was a fisherman operating near Fortescue Bay catching a variety of fish including barracuda.

In the past 12 years most of the fish have disappeared because of habitat destruction – a 2 Celsius rise in the average seawater temperature has killed most of the giant kelp forest, which had provided the breeding grounds for many of the fish species.

A team of scientists led by the pharmaceutical company Cortexyme found “strong evidence” of a link between Alzheimer’s and Porphyromonas gingivalis, the key bacteria in gum disease, University of Louisville researcher Jan Potempa said.

In Yield10’s 2018 Field Tests, the C3003 Gen 2.0 yield trait was tested for the first time in canola. The best C3003 Gen 2.0 canola lines showed an increase in seed yield of 11% as compared to control plants, a statistically significant outcome. In C3003 Gen 2.0 canola plants, the weight of an individual seed (measured using 1000 seeds) was similar to control plants, an expected outcome using the Gen 2.0 version of the C3003 trait.

As the climate changes, scientists know that there will be more years of extreme weather. That means extreme droughts, followed by years of heavier than normal rainfall, will become more likely. Dr. Gentine and his colleagues wondered if those conditions would balance out.

Coming from a different approach, the startup BeeHero aims to help bees do what they do best by monitoring the health of the hive itself. The startup has partnered with three of the largest commercial beekeepers in the U.S. to put simple IoT sensors into beehives to monitor more than 25 different factors (humidity, Colony Collapse Disorder, no queen, and so on). This methodology can predict hive issues before colonies are destroyed.

Gold & Silver

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Davos Elite Push to Automation

The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite (Fm NYT)
DAVOS, Switzerland — They’ll never admit it in public, but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible.
I know this because, for the past week, I’ve been mingling with corporate executives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. And I’ve noticed that their answers to questions about automation depend very much on who is listening.In public, many executives wring their hands over the negative consequences that artificial intelligence and automation could have for workers. They take part in panel discussions about building “human-centered A.I.” for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — Davos-speak for the corporate adoption of machine learning and other advanced technology — and talk about the need to provide a safety net for people who lose their jobs as a result of automation.
But in private settings, including meetings with the leaders of the many consulting and technology firms whose pop-up storefronts line the Davos Promenade, these executives tell a different story: They are racing to automate their own work forces to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers.

All over the world, executives are spending billions of dollars to transform their businesses into lean, digitized, highly automated operations. They crave the fat profit margins automation can deliver, and they see A.I. as a golden ticket to savings, perhaps by letting them whittle departments with thousands of workers down to just a few dozen.
“People are looking to achieve very big numbers,” said Mohit Joshi, the president of Infosys, a technology and consulting firm that helps other businesses automate their operations. “Earlier they had incremental, 5 to 10 percent goals in reducing their work force. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?'”

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Most of us here at PP are very aware of the negative impact that vast numbers of human beings have on, well, most everything. Living in a stable and ecologically rich and beautiful world will need a much smaller human population. Most know this.
The kindest and gentlest way to move towards a low population world would be through lower reproduction rates. But objection to this approach is widespread and multifactorial.
So population die of is seen as the most realistic next step. Horrible but realistic.
This issue has become particularly urgent as the Elite face the problem of the masses of deplorables who are unhappy being lower class citizens and are becoming more vocal about their unhappiness.
This seems to me to be the set up that would make “population thinning” for “the masses” look good to the elites. And really, to most with a long term view of the future, including preppers.
The elite think: “Should we stumble into population reduction willy nilly, or do it in an organized and controlled fashion?” (Where our families are not among the “thinned” and the natural resources of the Earth our left for our descendants?)

Automation

Issue with automation is not just limited to pushing workers aside:
1. Most industrial nations have rapidily ageing populations and younger worker do not want to work in manufacturing and industrial jobs.So the only alternative is to automate.
2. Workers are becoming increasly expensive. Gov’ts have been pilling on regulations which drive up labor costs. For instance Obamacare has more than doubled health insurance costs for workers. Companies are also mandated to cover them.
3. We been automating processes since the beggning of the industrial age. 200 year ago a farmer could managed 20 to 30 acres. Today a farmer can manage 200 to 400 acre farm thanks to automated ag equipment.
4. Most people embrace automation in their daily life. 100 years ago, people washed their laundry by hand. 40 years ago people wash dishes by hand. Today many consumers use robotic vacuum cleaners in their homes.
The real issue is that workers skills are not transisting to technical jobs. For instance automation factories are having trouble finding workers skilled enough to run & maintian automated systems. Realistically schools should be teaching kids to problem from 2nd grate. Reading, Math & coding should be the core of education. Second kid should be taught basic economics, how to manage money & debt, how machines work. The problem is the schools are filled with teachers that don’t know anything about math, science and programming. So the kids get an education on a bunch of obsolute skills.
if we had a labor force with the appropraites skills, automation would create more jobs than lost. We need people to solve technical issues and develop new products that consumers & business need. We don’t need millions of labors to make the perverbial buggy whip!